Decipher
by JayEllGee
Summary: Peter rarely got to be the brilliant one, but there was one subject he could better any of his friends in: secrets. Drabble. Third year. Implied James/Lily.


I managed to name my last fic after the biggest pop song in the world and not realise it. Luckily I checked the Billboard charts before naming this fic and changed it from its original title of "Trap Queen." Phew – that would have been embarrassing!

 **Decipher**

"I have a question."

"For whom?"

"For anyone."

It was almost ten o'clock, and Sirius was going through the restless phase he often had before curfew. Peter was usually more than happy to indulge, but not tonight; not after Professor Prendergast took him aside after Ancient Runes; not after she praised Peter for his excellent contributions during that day's lesson; not when she gave him her very own copy of _Advanced_ _Magical Hieroglyphs and Logograms_ to devour over until the end of term. No, tonight James and Remus would have to endure a round of Very Sirius Questions without Peter's involvement. He kept the voices of the others quietly behind his train of thought as background noise as he unravelled he secret codes of Grindelwald's wartime spies.

"Say we gave Moony a time turner-"

"-Why does Moony get the time turner?"

"I'm getting to that, James, calm yourself." Sirius said, jumping off the bed and onto the wooden floor with such force, Peter had to grab his inkpot before its contents could destroy the untranslated letters of Barrold the Boastful spread out in front of him. "Right, so we give Moony a time tuner the day _after_ a full moon."

"Oh, Christ, here we go…"

"And _then_ \- and this is the good part - Moony you turn it back twelve hours or whatever… what would happen?"

"We'd get expelled for stealing and misusing a time turner?"

"You lot are boring," Sirius sighed, dramatically collapsing back onto his bed and peering over at Peter's work. "So, Peter - how _are_ you so good at Runes anyway?"

Peter looked up from the parchment, meeting Sirius' quizzical look.

"It's supposed to be basically the most impossible subject there is," Sirius continued, "I mean properly impossible."

"It's not _that_ hard," Peter shrugged, pulling himself up off his elbows and into a sitting position. There was something more than a little satisfying about getting to downplay his apparent brilliance to his chronically "brilliant" friends; Sirius the Natural, Remus the Prodigy and James the All-Star. He was usually just relegated to Peter: The Other One. But third year was proving to be a bit different now that they were allowed to choose their own subjects and play to their own strengths. James and Sirius stuck to each other like glue for the most part, no surprises there, and both decried the fact that maybe Peter wanted to do his own thing for a change (it was apparently more acceptable for Remus to do his own thing because he prioritised academics over socialising and made a piss-poor companion during lessons most of the time anyway.) None of them hid the fact that they thought Peter was punching above his weight when he chose Ancient Runes instead of a more colour-by-numbers elective like Care of Magical Creatures or Muggle Studies.

But it made perfect sense to Peter. Runes were puzzles; stories and secrets written in a code long forgotten and only made decipherable again though cunning and problem solving. It reminded him of being a child, when his Aunt Enid, under the guise of letting him shadow her at the Ministry of Magic's European Embassy, would take him to the seaside at Skegness during the summer holidays. Mother would have absolutely died if she found out that Peter was spending his summers fraternising with muggles so he and Aunt Enid could only ever discuss their plans in code.

So, when Aunt Enid picked him up and told Mother: "We'll be meeting with the head of the Icelandic Magical Creatures Advisory Bureau, although the conversations usually go around in circles – the man loves to waffle. Constantly trying to reinvent the wheel. Bit of an ass, really." Peter would have to pull out the clues to work out what they were really going to do that day (in that particular case – donkey rides on the pier followed by ice cream cones on the Ferris wheel.)

But more than anything else, he loved going to the muggle picture house. The films were usually quite good, if a bit far-fetched sometimes (two summers earlier he saw one called _Bedknobs and Brooksticks_ , which proved to be a quaint portrayal of magic from a muggle's perspective involving some sort of portkey bed and suits of armour that fought enemy muggle soldiers.) But Peter's favourite films where he ones that starred James Bond. He distinctively remembered being seven years old and seeing _You Only Live Twice_ for the first time – he remembered watching in shock as Bond was seemingly assassinated within the first five minutes and Peter held his breath until the moment Agent 007 bounced back to life again. He gasped and cheered every single time Bond sneakily outsmarted his advisories, cracked the safe, utilised the gadgets and got the girl.

"You just need to be in the right frame of mind for it," he told Sirius, feeling just the tiniest bit self-satisfied by his friend's baffled look.

"Alright, let's see." Sirius pulled the nearest scroll towards himself. "Honestly, how hard can it be?"

He may not have said it, but Peter could hear the _"…if Peter can do it"_ loud and clear.

"That's the second page," he told Sirius.

"Does it matter?"

"You're also reading it upside down."

"We it's not even in English anyway," Sirius protested huffily, pushing the scroll back into its place. "I don't even want to read it anymore." And after a whole four seconds of determination, Sirius lost his interest in Ancient Runes and Peter gained some of his footing back.

"Well done, Sirius," James laughed. "Stellar Runology work there."

Sirius folded his arms indignantly. "Go ahead and try it yourself if you're so clever."

James brushed himself from his bed and sauntered over to Peter's ever growing work circle and picked up the scroll Sirius had given up on. "Right, so what is it we're looking at?"

"These are the letters of Barrold the Boastful," Peter explained, pointing at Professor Prendergast's notes on top of the first scroll. "He was a double agent for Gridelwald during the war."

"Oi, Pettigrew, you never game me any help!" Sirius objected.

"You never asked for any," James retorted.

"Anyway," Peter continued, "Gridelwald's spies used the theories of Runology to create codes for their letters."

"So…" James said slowly, trying to work it out. "All I need to do is look up the runes on the letters in a Runology book, find their meanings and work out what it says?"

"Well, it's a bit more complicated than that," said Peter. "The spies changed the runes from their original meanings, otherwise the enemy would be able to intercept the messages right away."

"So the translations in the book don't match the translations in the letters?"

"Pretty much."

"So it's like using a French dictionary to translate something written in Chinese?"

"More or less."

"But…." James said, peering above his glasses and squinting at the runes, "where do you even start with something like that?"

"And that's where the problem solving comes into play."

"But how do you work out _how_ to solve it?" James asked, now squinting so hard his eyes were practically shut. "Urgh, I don't get it – Moony, help us out here!"

Remus, who had been quietly watching from his own bed, rolled over and made his way over to the group circle.

"Come on, Moony," Sirius chanted. "Do it for your one true love: homework!"

Peter felt a small twist in this stomach; he knew that Sirius was too impatient for Runes and James too overconfident, but Remus may actually persevere long enough to work it out on his own. He enjoyed trying to explain the subject to them, but felt a little unsettled by the idea of one of them actually being able to _understand_ it. Runes was his, and is irrational as it seemed, he didn't want one of the others to take it away from him.

"I can't made a lick of sense out of this," James moaned, handing the work over to Remus, who, unlike James or Sirius, actually took the time to read the instructions Professor Prendergast had given.

" _Using your understanding of contemporary applications of the traditional Runic alphabet, translate the letters of Barrold the Boastful into English,_ " Remus muttered, " _Runes may represent letters, diagraphs or complete words and phrases. These particular letters pertain to the infiltration of the Ministry of Magic with the intentions of overthrowing the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy."_

"See you both got a lot more help than I did!" Sirius protested.

"It's called reading the directions," Remus said in a lecturing tone. "It's not rocket science."

"What's rocket science?"

Remus ignored him and instead focused on the homework in front of him. "Well… the book says here that that smaller runes are usually used to indicate single letters. The first rune on this letter is tiny, so that probably means it starts with a single-letter word… the most common single-letter word is 'A', so it stands to reason that the first word is 'A', right?"

Peter didn't answer, but obediently waved his wand over the scroll, the symbols shone and turned into the suggested letter.

Sirius let out a victorious cheer, suddenly interested in the code again. "Yes! Do it again, do another one!"

Remus squinted, eyes scrolling across the code, "right, erm, so there's a two letter word after a lot of these 'A's. A is a determiner so it's probably a noun. Or an adjective. Or possibly a verb."

"Wow," James deadpanned, "that certainly narrows it down."

"The only two letter noun I can think of is ox," Remus muttered, ignoring James, "but then it would have to be ' _an_ ox' to make grammatical sense… wait, Grindelwald was German, are these in German? Because I can't speak German."

"No," Peter shook his head, "you were wrong straight off the bat."

Remus blinked a few times, as if this was some sort of impossibility.

"The single word isn't the letter A for a start," Peter explained.

"Oh," Remus said, still looking confused, "I just assumed, because logically-"

"That's the problem though," Peter said. "Logic is a code's worst enemy – logic makes things easy to work out. Think James Bond - does he have a penknife in case he gets tied up? No! He had a buzz saw on his watch instead. Not logical at all, but if he just had a penknife, the enemy would have taken it off him and he'd never escape!"

"Then how do you do it?" James asked, scooting closer.

"Well the first hint is the author," Peter said, pointing to Professor Prendergast's notes at the top of the parchment. "Barrold the Boastful was infamously vain – a classic narcissist. No one ever suspected him as a spy because no one ever thought he'd ever be able not to brag about _being_ a spy!"

"Hear that, Sirius? We can trust that you'll never become a spy."

"Piss off, Potter."

"Anyway," Peter cut them off. "That tells you that there's probably going to be a lot of 'I's and 'me's, so-"

"So the first two words are 'I am'," James finished. "Not 'an ox'. Honestly, Lupin, who starts a letter with 'an ox'? I can't believe I thought you'd be good at this."

"I agree with Sirius: Piss off, Potter."

"But none of this answers my original question!" Sirius protested.

"What would happen if you gave Moony a time turner-"

"No my _other_ original question: Peter, how in Merlin's name are you so good at this?"

They all stared at Peter, slightly taken aback that he was the focus of the attention for a change. He considered telling them about Aunt Enid, or the fact that he simply liked secrets, that he liked getting inside other people's heads and translating their thoughts, that he liked codenames and double bluffs and bowler hats that doubled as guillotines. That it just… made sense to him.

But just because he liked secrets, didn't mean he wanted to divulge his own.

"I don't know," he answered, "I just am."

Sirius' face fell slightly, clearly expecting to hear some interesting story about how Peter discovered an amazing secret shortcut to deciphering Runes and instead getting "Just because." He seemed unsettled by the fact that Peter had one over him and could even provide Sirius and explanation for it. It shouldn't have made Peter feel pleased, but it did.

James, seeing Sirius' disappointed reaction, chimed in. "Well everyone's got their strengths and weaknesses; Remus is so bad at potion brewing, I don't even think I'd trust him to make me a cup of tea."

"Fair enough, that's true," Remus shrugged.

"And I think Professor Flitwick will actually cry if he gets one more essay from Sirius about the theory of charmwork that amounts to 'I don't know, you just do it!'"

"But you _do_ just do it," Sirius argued.

"Imagine you as a teacher," James sighed. " _Alright class, today we're going to learn summoning: just point your wand and do it_!"

"I don't really see the problem," said Sirius, shaking his head.

"Okay, try this," said James turning to Remus. "So, Moony… have you tried just _not_ being a werewolf?"

Remus feigned dawning realisation, his eyes wide. "I _knew_ there was something I'd forgotten! I was too busy doing ridiculous experiments with time turners."

"Oh and like you're so perfect," Sirius retorted, throwing a balled up sock at James. "We all know you only took Muggle Studies because you want to impress Lily Evans with your knowledge of… of… whachumacallem… bat rays!"

"Bat rays?" James repeated, trying to make sense of the words.

"You know," Sirius explained, "the little things muggles put in the things to make the things go?"

"The things…" James tried again. "Bat… do you mean _batteries_?"

"I don't know, maybe," Sirius replied. "I've only ever heard Remus say it and he has a weird accent what with being a commoner from the north."

"Not everything above London is _The North_ ," Remus droned.

"So, Moony," James said, slyly. "Have you tried just _not_ being northern?"

And with that, Peter was once again forgotten, his brilliance just a few moments earlier no longer mattering. He put his head back down to make sense of what was in front of him.

 _I am getting closer. They have no idea of my power…_

 _But one day I will deceive them all._


End file.
